This time, I have a just-post-war comedy (well, they're nearly all comedies, once you get out of the first decade of his long career) unrelated to any of his major series, about a peer who looks like a butler and wants to marry his cook, get out of his stately pile, and settle down running a pub. That's Spring Fever, from 1948.
It also felt like another Wodehouse book that could have been adapted from a stage play, but I find from Wikipedia - which I have no reason to disbelieve - that it was actually the other way around; Spring Fever was adapted into a play, which was not produced, which was then adapted into another novel, The Old Reliable, which I've actually read recently.
Holding up the juvenile romance end of the plot are two young American friends. First is Stanwood Cobbold, a beefy ex-college football player not overly endowed with brains, sent by his tycoon father to London to extricate him from his entanglement with the mercurial movie star Eileen Stoker, whom he wants to marry. His smarter friend is Mycroft "Mike" Cardinal, junior Hollywood agent who is himself deeply head-over-heels with Lady Theresa "Terry" Cobbold, third and nicest daughter of the Earl Lord Shortlands, called "Shorty" by Terry.
Shorty is the aforementioned peer who wants to marry his cook. He owns the stately pile Beevor, in Kent, and hates it. Mrs. Punter, that cook, wants to marry a man with two hundred pounds to invest in a London pub, so she can get out of service and into business for herself. She has some standards for who that man will be, but is willing to be somewhat flexible in her ends. Shorty, sadly, doesn't have two hundred pounds, which torments him. Worse, his rival in love is his own butler, the wily and scheming Mervyn Spink, whose success at betting threatens to give him the financial leg up in their competition.
Mostly in charge at Bevor is Shorty's domineering eldest daughter Lady Adela Topping, married to the rich American Desborough, whose money keeps the castle as solvent as it's possible for an English castle in 1948 to be. The middle daughter is Lady Claire; she doesn't do much in the book but is heading towards marriage with a well-off but deeply tedious playwright currently staying at Beevor.
Also important is Stanwood's man Augustus Robb, a reformed burglar and current teetotaler.
The last major piece of the plot is a fantastically valuable stamp, discovered in an old album in Beevor and squabbled over by Shorty and Spink. As part of their machinations, the two young men arrive at Beevor as impostors: first Mike, pretending to be Stanwood (who wanted to stay in London to be with Eileen, filming a picture there), and then Stanwood, pretending to be someone who can vouch for Spink's claim to the stamp.
There's a fair bit of plotting among various factions to get the stamp and further their schemes, some running about, the usual severed-hearts stuff, a failed safebreaking and related drunk scene, and other usual Wodehouse bits. In the end, both young couples ride off into the sunset (or, rather, the registry office) to get married as quickly as possible. Shorty finds happiness in a slightly different way, which is not usual for Wodehouse - generally, if he sets up potential marriages at the beginning of the book, he ticks off every single one of them at the end.
It's all slightly quicker and tighter than it could possibly have been - one reason why I thought it might have been a play - with opportunities for additional comedy material (such as the stuffy playwright) left almost entirely as suggestions. In my mind, Spring Fever is a three-hundred-page novel that would have been better off about four hundred pages, with possibly the addition of a policeman, bringing Eileen onto stage at least once, and some actual thefts of the stamp for spice.
But the book Wodehouse actually wrote is just fine and quite entertaining in his best manner, so that's a pure quibble.
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